A thousand strands of time-each with its own collection of sights, smells and sounds-spin themselves to form it, this thing called place. When we're most troubled, our souls tend to find some way to carry us back to it. Those thousand strands-moments, we call them-form a tapestry of remembrance that serves as an anchor to our soul.
Anchors, those heavy things we toss to hold us safe in storms, can also be a curse, dragging beneath the surface, impeding our progress.
Place shapes all of us, almost as much as our families, and certainly more than our circumstances. Long after we've left our childhood behind, place beckons us with memories of simpler moments and easier times. It helps if the moments really were simpler and the times really were easier, but even if they weren't, place has a way of scrubbing off the "hard" and leaving a remembrance easy to admire. Easy, too, to long for.
The Bible speaks often and deeply of place; so too the poets and dreamers.
Better than stepping outside a rural Missouri farmhouse to hear the morning orchestra instantly cease as crickets, crows and even coyotes quit their roaring chorus to sort out if I'm friend or foe?
Better than twisting straw around my finger as twenty of us sit in August's humid heat, a circle of shirtless boys and shirted tomboys waiting impatiently at second base for Don McCrary to stop mowing the outfield?
Better than the cooling dirt of Fishing River's banks as we sit and wait for catfish to yank our fishing lines, whippoorwills and crickets (again) bellowing because they've decided we're too sedentary to do them any harm?
"Country folks" often have a hard time believing "city folks" have a sense of place. "City folks," on the other hand, frequently say they can't imagine growing up "in the boons." Clearly place is tied to geography, but it's not just about geography, and it's not just found in one kind of setting. Place is about a cascading collision of clarity and serenity and safety that mixes in just so with memories and people in a way that makes us feel, even for the briefest of moments, that we're more than just temporary; that the something inside us that makes us "in His image" isn't something that can be snuffed out. And comforting as that truth is, it's also the source of all that's marvelous and all that's terrible about life after life. If we can't be snuffed out; if we're really permanent, then "place" after death means even more than life before death. Only when we understand place in this context can we understand the urgency of Jesus pleas for us to receive Him; only then can we understand the earnestness of Paul's pleas when he begs us to be "living sacrifices"; only then can we understand the importance of Peter's words when he reminds us to be "ready to give an answer for the hope that is in us." Much as place means here, it means even more "over there."
If we have pleasant memories of places that made us who we are here, then we'll have a head start on understanding the incredibly exponential glory of the Place we're headed for there. The two places form oases of hope that make it easier to bear the times between.
Better still, we'll have comfort and anchors both coming and going.
And as our dear friend, Ina, who's already with Jesus used to tell everyone she met: "I really, really want to know you'll be there."
If you don't know Jesus yet, let us introduce you to Him.
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